


Vidi, Vici...Veni. Chapter V.

by MyDesign



Series: Vidi, Vici...Veni. [5]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Cannibalism, Crack, Humor, M/M, Post-Episode: s03e13 The Wrath of the Lamb
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-22
Updated: 2015-09-22
Packaged: 2018-04-22 22:04:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,638
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4852181
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MyDesign/pseuds/MyDesign
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The aftermath of the first kill for the murder husbands goes about as smoothly as the kill itself...which is to say, not smoothly at all.  Hannibal and Will have their first fight, oh dear!  A lovers' spat!</p>
            </blockquote>





	Vidi, Vici...Veni. Chapter V.

**Author's Note:**

> **I figured out the whole "chapters" thing on AO3, so I'm now posting this fic as it probably should have been from the beginning (don't shame the noob!). You can read/bookmark it[here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4852271)!**

 

 

CHAPTER V

 

Hannibal was standing in the dark of the driveway in a fresh murder suit, hands folded patiently in front of him. How in the world he had managed to beat Will back to the house was beyond him, but he was choosing to be optimistic about the younger man's abilities and electing not to panic. Much.

 

Twenty minutes later, lights appeared on the road leading to the house. Will turned the Bentley and backed it into the driveway. Hannibal opened the garage door and pulled two orange flags out of his plastic pockets, playing the role of crossing guard, gestures letting Will know how much room he had to back up.

 

"Where have you been?" Hannibal asked as the other man climbed out of the driver's seat.

 

"I got lost," Will huffed. "I don't know my way around here and it's not like I could exactly stop and ask for directions." He gestured to his blood-soaked clothing.

 

"There's GPS in the car," Hannibal furrowed his brow.  "The house is programmed into it."

 

"What's GPS?" Will asked, confused.

 

"Nevermind." Hannibal opened the trunk of the Bentley. "Let's take care of this. Bring over that wheelbarrow."

 

A couple minutes later, Michael Dougherty's body and tattered scraps of suit jacket were unceremoniously dumped into a nearby wheelbarrow.

 

"There's an entrance to the basement at the back of the garage," Hannibal said as he pulled the WeatherTech® liner out of the trunk. "Take him down there while I get this cleaned off. I'll be right down," he said as he dragged the large plastic bin outside to hose it off.

 

Will hoisted up the handles of the wheelbarrow with a loud grunt. He attempted to carefully maneuver it between the car and the wall of the garage, but the load was rather heavy and Will is a rather smol guy. The wheelbarrow veered to the right, the front corner making contact with the Bentley and leaving a long winding scratch along the pristine paint job.

 

Dropping the wheelbarrow, Will's eyes went wide and his hands flew to his mouth. He looked around quickly to make sure Hannibal wasn't still in the garage with him. Satisfied that there was no witness to the damage he'd done to the car, he redoubled his efforts.

 

Will quickly picked up the wheelbarrow handles again and carefully steered it away from the car and to the back of the garage. There he found a door, opening it to reveal a long concrete staircase descending into a dimly lit basement.

 

"How the hell am I supposed to get this down there?" he mumbled to himself.

 

Finding a wooden doorstop lying nearby, he propped open the door to the basement and lined the wheelbarrow up with the stairs.

 

"Well, here goes nothing," he said.

 

Carefully, he eased the wheelbarrow to the top of the stairs, using all of his strength to control it's painfully slow descent onto the first step.

 

_THUNK!_

 

So far so good, he eased the wheel down to the next step.

 

_THUNK!_

 

Hey, this wasn't as bad as he thought it would be! Feeling a bit more confident, he picked up the pace a bit and traversed the next three steps down.

 

_THUNK! THUNK! THUNK!_

 

The pace may have been picked up a bit too much, however, as Will felt the heavy load threatening to pull away from him.

 

"No, no, no!" he exclaimed as the smooth wood of the handles freed themselves of his grip, sending the wheelbarrow and it's deceased passenger plummeting down the hard staircase with a deafening series of bangs and crashes. Once at the bottom of the stairs, the momentum tipped the wheelbarrow onto its edge, the body inside sliding out onto the floor as the wheelbarrow came to rest precariously perched against the railing.

 

"Shitshitshit!" Will practically fell down the stairs in his haste to reach the bottom, feet sliding out from under him a couple steps from the smooth floor below. Instinctively, he reached for the nearest object to brace himself on. Unfortunately, the nearest object was the precariously perched wheelbarrow, his lunge against it knocking it loose.

 

In what felt like super slo-mo, the wheelbarrow slid off the final steps and landed with a disgustingly graphic _THUDCRUNCHSQUISH_ on Michael Dougherty's head. A cartoonish geyser of blood exploded outwards, completely covering every last inch of Will that wasn't already covered in blood.

 

Will stood silent and in shock for what felt like several minutes before the silence was broken by a loud mechanical whirring behind and to the left of him. He turned slowly as the whirring came to a stop, revealing Hannibal standing in what looked like a three-walled cage.

 

"There's an elevator, Will," he said, only the slightest hint of amusement in his voice. "How about I take it from here?"

 

Will could only nod as he turned and made his way back up the stairs.

 

===

 

An hour later, Hannibal found a freshly showered Will Graham sitting at the counter in the kitchen, a juice box in his hand. Four empty juice boxes littered the surface in front of him, the boxes smashed and distorted until every last drop had been sucked from their depths.

 

I'm sure that's a metaphor for something, but I'll leave it up to you to figure out what. Think of it like a "choose your own adventure" kinda thing.

 

"Thoughts?" Hannibal asked, removing his suit jacket and draping it over the back of a chair. He poured himself a glass of wine and took a seat opposite the other man.

 

Will took a long, noisy slurp of his juice box before setting it down in front of him. "What happened tonight?" he asked. "What happened to the synchronicity we had in taking down the Great Red Dragon?"

 

Hannibal shrugged. "Everyone has their off nights," he answered plainly, "and I am, admittedly, a bit rusty." He reached a hand over and placed it on top of Will's. "We'll get there," he said with a reassuring smile. "Don't worry."

 

"I'm not worried," Will said. "I just thought it would go differently."

 

"Did you not enjoy it?"

 

The dangerous glint that Hannibal had come to love returned to Will's eyes at that. "Oh, I enjoyed it," he said, voice low. "There's a power and a thrill that comes from taking a life that I can't deny any longer." He looked at the man across from him, his mentor in this twisted journey. "You saw it in me, and in seeing it in me, you wanted me to see it. You saw to it that I saw what you already saw and continued to see it in me even though I chose not to see what you saw, even after you made me see. My eyes were closed, refusing to see what you saw all along until I could no longer _not_ see what you see, I had to admit that I see it as well and you saw me seeing me and I couldn't pretend anymore that I didn't see what you saw from the beginning. If I pretended now that I don't see it, you would see right through my lies because you've always seen it and saw to it that I saw it too."

 

The wheels turned in Hannibal's head as he tried to process what Will was saying. "I see," he said finally.

 

"Exactly." Will nodded and took another noisy drink from his juice box.

 

Hannibal rose to stand. "Come," he said, "let's go to bed. Tomorrow, I'll make us the finest dinner two men have ever shared, to celebrate our first triumph of our new lives."

 

Will stood and took the offered hand, content.

 

===

 

The seldom realized downside to the elaborate twelve-course meals that Hannibal created was that on those days, he did nothing but cook from the time he got up in the morning until dinner was ready late in the evening.

 

Hannibal was already up and hard at work in the kitchen when Will got up at the crack of 11am. He padded downstairs in his underwear and sat watching the other man cut vegetables, eating a large bowl of Fruity Pebbles with a serving spoon. After awhile, he got bored and went back upstairs to get showered and dressed for the day.

 

Showered and dressed for the day, Will wandered the house aimlessly. He went into the sitting room to mess around on the piano, but found the key lids on both the piano and the harpsichord had been locked shut. Finding it strange, he made a mental note to ask Hannibal about that later.

 

Electing to explore the parts of the large house he hadn't been to yet, he meandered up and down the halls, opening every closed door he came across and looking inside.

 

Will had seen two bedrooms in the hallway upstairs that was full of closed doors, but he found that most of the other doors led to other bedrooms as well. The beds in each room were arranged in a variety of configurations, ranging from separate twin beds or bunk beds to varying sizes of large single beds, some with elaborate canopies and some with power cords plugging into the walls. Decorations in the rooms were anywhere from simple, subtle decor to full scale marble statues of naked men in various artsy poses.

 

Will moved to a closed door in the hall of bedrooms and turned the knob. He opened the door to look inside and froze in his tracks. All of the other rooms had been decorated in dark and muted colors, but the room in front of him now was garish in bright reds and pinks. One wall of the room and the entire ceiling were mirrors, reflecting a large heart-shaped bed covered with black satin sheets.

 

Will's eyes lingered on the wall at the head of the bed however. The entire span of the wall had been painted with an elaborate mural, a replica of God touching fingers with Man in the Sistine Chapel. However, in place of God was the likeness of Hannibal, the Man across from him looking so much like Will that Will had to wonder if had posed for the portrait at some point without realizing it. In place of the crowd of cherubs surrounding Hannibal, there was a flock of puppies of all shapes and colors.

 

Will backed slowly out of the room, pulling the door shut in front of him. In that moment, he decided to pretend he'd never seen the room and to never contemplate Hannibal having made the decision to decorate it as such.

 

Another door in the hallway led to a dressing room a lot like the one that Hannibal had prepared for Will. The closets in this room were filled with a variety of strange costumes though. One closet was filled with nothing but baby doll dresses and heeled shoes and handbags in all sorts of colors, a large portion of them black in what Will recalled was known as the "Gothic Lolita" style. Wondering if Hannibal had some strange fetish for wearing girl's clothing, Will pulled out a short dress with a particularly poofy skirt and noted that it was too small for Hannibal to wear. Returning the dress to the rack, he shut the doors and left the room wondering who exactly Hannibal intended to wear any of it.

 

Continuing his exploration of the grounds, Will headed outside to check out the large plain building beyond the back yard. He pulled open the heavy double doors with a grunt and felt along the wall for a light switch. Finding one and flipping it, he shielded his eyes at the sudden brightness as the building flooded with light.

 

Will found himself transported to Sicily. Not literally of course, but he had to look back out the yard and large white house beyond to reassure himself that he was still in South Carolina. In front of him stretched the Norman Chapel, vaulted ceilings adorned with faces of saints peering down on him. He'd been to the Norman Chapel several times during his stay in Italy and visited it countless times in his memory palace. The room in front of him with such a perfect and exact replica that he felt almost out-of-body in how out-of-place the chapel was here in the middle of a field.

 

He switched off the lights and closed the doors, going back towards the house. A check in with Hannibal told him that it was still several hours until dinner, the older man suggesting Will find a book to read in the study.

 

The study off of the foyer, as it turns out, was an exact replica of Hannibal's office back in Baltimore. The dark wood, red striped curtains, shelves of books, even the furniture was exactly the same as it had been in Maryland. At that point, Will was willing to just go with it and not be surprised anymore, so he climbed the ladder to the balcony in search of a good book to read.

 

Unfortunately, about 50% of the books on Hannibal's shelves were medical texts and books on psychology. About 35% were books in other languages. The remaining 15% consisted of classic literature, with an impressively large collection of romance novels with lewd titles. Trying to decide between _Moby Dick_ and _Moby's Dick_ , Will chose the former and returned to the sitting room, settling down on the couch to read the afternoon away.

 

===

 

" _Nom Long Somptueux, avec La Prétention et la Viande Humaine_ ," Hannibal said, setting a steaming plate in front of Will and placing one for himself. He unbuttoned the jacket of his blue three-piece suit and took his seat at the head of the table.

 

"Sounds delicious," Will said, picking up his knife and fork and contemplating where to begin with the dish.

 

Hannibal raised his wine glass to his lips to take a drink, pausing to watch as Will cut a piece of the thick portion of meat on his plate, shoving it into his mouth almost a little too eagerly. Will closed his eyes and hummed appreciatively at the taste, Hannibal smiled.

 

"I'm surprised, Will," Hannibal said, gently placing his wine glass on the table and picking up his own knife and fork, "that you are so easily accepting of my unorthodox cuisine. It's one thing to accept me and my tastes, but another to so readily participate."

 

Will froze, his sixth bite perched halfway between his plate and his mouth. He thought quickly, not wanting Hannibal to know just how much he had craved the delicious human flesh that Hannibal had served him so many times before. "I figured it would be rude to expect you to prepare separate meals for the both of us," he answered, hoping the other man wouldn't see through his obvious lie.

 

"I think you enjoy it," Hannibal smirked, seeing through Will's obvious lie. "You just don't want to admit it."

 

Will coughed. "It is not...unpleasant," he admitted, trying not to sound too fake. "After how many times I realized in retrospect I had probably been served human at your dinner table, it hardly seems worth it to feel scandalized by the taboo now."

 

"Ah, but even then, you participated willingly," Hannibal smiled knowingly. "You knew very well that I would be able to tell what kind of meat you brought to my kitchen after you claimed to have murdered Freddie Lounds. As it wasn't Miss Lounds herself, I've found myself often wondering who exactly it was that Will Graham carved up and set on fire." He looked at him expectantly.

 

Will downed the remainder of his glass of wine and quickly poured himself another, leaving this author flailing and unable to even come up with her _own_ headcanon of whoTF's body Will used in place of Freddie's.

 

"I was thinking today," Hannibal changed the subject on behalf of the other man's awkward silence, "that I might find work in the city. I imagine we'll probably be staying here for quite some time."

 

"A job?" Will asked, perplexed. "You said that you have enough money and means stashed away for several lifetimes. Why would you need to work?"

 

"A few reasons. For one, it will give us a connection to the area and the people," Hannibal answered. "Better to hide in the public than to hide in solitary and draw the scrutiny of strangers. It will also give us time to be apart, time for you to explore your hobbies and have the alone time away from me that I know you will come to crave."

 

Will smiled, surprised at Hannibal's thoughtfulness. "I'm surprised at your thoughtfulness," he smiled. "While I don't feel like I would mind your company, I have to admit that I'll probably have days where I miss my solitary life in Wolf Trap."

 

The conversation ended abruptly as neither man had anything else to say on the matter.

 

After dinner, Hannibal and Will relocated to the large upstairs balcony, perched above the front door of the house and looking east towards the distant ocean.

 

"I was reading _Moby Dick_ today," Will said.

 

"Oh?" Hannibal had one arm draped easily around the other man's shoulders, his other hand at risk of permanently fusing to the wine glass that always seemed to be in his grasp.

 

"It made me miss my boat," Will sighed. "I think I might like to get one in the future, if possible."

 

"Of course," Hannibal said. He paused for a moment before adding, "I'm sorry for the things that you had to leave behind."

 

"Oh, we didn't have a boat at the house in Maine," Will said. "Molly wouldn't let me, said it was too expensive of a thing to just have sitting around in the yard 95% of the time."

 

"That bitch," Hannibal muttered under his breath, more than slightly other-womaned.

 

"My boat was left in Italy," Will explained, "when Mason Verger's men grabbed us and brought us back to the States."

 

Hannibal tilted his head in question. "You sailed your _boat_ to Italy when you came to find me?"

 

"Yes."

 

"Seriously?"

 

"Yes?"

 

"By yourself?"

 

"...Yes?"

 

Hannibal let out a sharp laugh. "Do you realize how ridiculous that is?"

 

"No?" Will frowned.

 

"To sail your boat, across the Atlantic, by yourself," Hannibal thought for a moment. "That had to have taken you weeks!"

 

"Almost two months," Will replied. "Why does it matter?"

 

"It's just ridiculous," Hannibal laughed again. "There I was, hanging out in Italy for months on end, wondering where you were and what you were doing. No wonder it took you so long to come find me, you took the slowest possible method of getting there!"

 

"Maybe I needed time to think," Will said defensively. "I needed time to decide what to do once I found you. True, I still hadn't decided once I got there..." he admitted, "but that's beside the point! Maybe I had secretly hoped that we would leave Italy and sail around the world together, did you think of that?"

 

Hannibal gave him a disbelieving smirk, which only served to incense Will even more.

 

"And maybe we could have," Will stood and turned to face the man seated in front of him, "if you hadn't tried to eat my brain instead!" His fingers went to the long thin scar on his forehead.

 

At this, Hannibal stood to meet him. "Hey now, you pulled a knife on me before that. If Chiyoh hadn't been there, you would have killed me right there in the palazzo!"

 

Will puffed up defensively. "Maybe I was just ready to defend myself against muggers!"

 

"Oh yes," Hannibal rolled his eyes, "because art gallery muggings is all the craze."

 

"Face it, you were just too busy playing house with _Bedelia_ ," Will said the name with more than just a little contempt, "to notice how she was manipulating you into killing me. If you would have just killed her in the first place, we could have been sailing around the world for the past 3 years, sending postcards to Jack and Alana."

 

"Don't you talk to _me_ about _playing house_ ," Hannibal's eyes narrowed. "I spent three very long years locked up in a mental institution, waiting for you while you _played house_ with your cute little wife and fake son. You were off attending baseball games and PTA meetings while I was poked and prodded like some sort of animal."

 

"You turned _yourself_ in," Will pointed out.

 

"Because you manipulated me to do so!"

 

"Yes, I manipulated you!" Will threw his hands up.   "You're just bitter that you, the master of manipulation himself, could fall so easily for my trap. The great _Hannibal the Cannibal_ got a taste of his own medicine!"

 

At that, Hannibal's fists clenched. " _Don't_ call me that," he hissed.

 

"Hannibal the Cannibal! Hannibal the Cannibal!" Will danced around him pettishly. "Poor little Hannibal the Cannibal, locked up in a cell for three years! Far from his harpsichord and his dinner parties and his fancy suits." Will punctuated the last by ruffling the red pocket square sticking out of Hannibal's suit jacket.

 

Hannibal looked down at the red fabric now hanging limply out of his breast pocket. "You did _not_ just do that," he growled as if he had just been given the ultimate offense. He glared proverbial daggers. "Maybe I _should_ have eaten you when I had the chance," he spat. "You could never be on _my_ level."

 

Will's face turned red as he searched for the perfect retort. "You know what?" he turned to go back into the house. "Eat a dick, Hannibal the Cannibal!" He spun to face the other man, finger leveled at him. "EAT A DICK!" He stormed into the house and slammed the door.

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Honestly, the only reason I decided that they were going to get in a fight at all is because the idea of Will telling Hannibal to "eat a dick" was the funniest thought I'd had all week and I wanted to use it. I live a simple life.
> 
> **I figured out the whole "chapters" thing on AO3, so I'm now posting this fic as it probably should have been from the beginning (don't shame the noob!). You can read/bookmark it[here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4852271)!**


End file.
